feature:

…Although The Threshold Centre, as the community is called, is open to all ages (the youngest resident they have had, was two) and most residents like the green and spiritual aspect of the centre, co-housing is being touted as an antidote to the chronic loneliness many people face in old age. Groups have sprung up across the country: 12 are established, and another 32 are in development, three of which hope to create homes exclusively for older people. Co-housing, says Professor William Lauder at the University of Stirling, who has studied the health effects of loneliness, is an “absolutely perfect” solution to what has become “one of the most important and least-addressed public health issues”. …

Disability and ill health have long been recognised as triggers for loneliness but the fragmentation of society – the decline of the nuclear family, the way we move around for work, the fact that fewer families live with older relatives, and of course, the increasing numbers of people living alone – clearly adds to the problem.

Iris Nichol, for instance, moved from her home in Newcastle to live next door to her daughter in a village in Northumberland 10 years ago. She is 80 and sees her daughter, a headmistress, every day and has close relationships with her other children, she also visits a day centre run by the age positive charity, WRVS. But because her daughter works long hours, it can be a solitary existence, as she often does not see anyone else. “People are different today,” she says. “They keep themselves to themselves. If you ask them to help, they are always willing, but I have been more or less incapacitated for the last few years and not one has asked me if I am all right.

“I grew up in a little mining village in County Durham. We lived in an enclave of people who worked for the same boss, but nowadays it is only retired people here. I sit where I can see out the window to the focal point of the village, and most days I see no one at all. There’s no movement, apart from a cat.”

Iris says it was the local bus service being cut that compounded her feeling of isolation, because she could no longer get around on her own to visit the shops or go to a cafe. She tells me that the day before we talk she did not see anyone until her daughter came home at 9pm, then poignantly corrects herself: “The postman always gives me a wave.”

David McCullough, chief executive of WRVS says it is a problem he has heard many times. The charity started to research loneliness after the people it supports said it was the thing that made the most difference in their lives, over financial or even health worries.

Despite the scale of the problem, few people are willing to admit to feeling lonely – Nichol, for instance, won’t use the word of herself but says her problem is “more a lack of company”. Loneliness is still stigmatised, says Cacioppo and “those who are afflicted by it tend to deny it, ignore it, or tough it out”.

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asks:

A few months ago, Nicki Roswell had a knock on her door. A neighbour needed the back of her dress laced up and didn’t have anyone to do it for her. Ms. Roswell sympathized, since she lives alone herself, and fastened the woman’s clothing.The two are residents of Liberty Village, a fast-growing downtown Toronto neighbourhood where nearly 55 per cent of the population – 2,200 people, from ambitious twentysomethings to midlife professionals – resides solo.

While they may live by themselves, demographically they are in good company: There are now, for the first time, more one-person households in Canada than those populated by couples who have children. (Only two-person households are more common.)

Census figures released last fall revealed that 27.6 per cent of Canadian homes have just one occupant, a vast shift from decades past.

Single dwellers accounted for only 7.4 per cent of homes in 1951 and 13.4 per cent in 1971.

Today, there are 3,673,305 single-occupancy households in the country, an increase that is mirrored in the United States and a few steps behind similar trends in Europe.

For her part, Ms. Roswell has enjoyed being “sequestered” in her bachelor townhouse since 2009, after her divorce. And the 39-year-old art director is not in any hurry to change it.

“You’re not anxious,” she says, “about ‘completing your life’ or ‘moving to the next phase,’ because this phase is not a place of discomfort.”

At least, not until it’s made that way by others, such as the family friend who asked her pointedly why women today believe their lives must be “perfect” before they have children, or the business associate who urged her to “go out and get some sperm, right away!”

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at Time.com:

Are today’s young adults struggling for too long, unable to leave the nest after years of helicopter parenting—or are they just reliving the same issues that previously stumped their elders?

New York Times magazine writer Robin Marantz Henig and her daughter Samantha Henig, an editor at the New York Times, try to answer these questions in their new book, 20something: Why Do Young Adults Seem Stuck? TIME spoke with them recently about the so-called Millennial generation and its discontents.

I was very glad to see that in your book, you consider 20somethings in two ways— one that you title “Same as It Ever Was” and the other “Now Is New.”  Many books and articles on this topic assume everything is unprecedented, but complaints about “these kids today” go back at least to Plato. 

RH: Our primary theme is that the 20s are times of making decisions and there are all sorts of doors that you have to start closing.  I think it’s more interesting in a way that it’s always been like this. It’s so easy to forget when you are in your 50s and 60s what things really were like when you were young.  But yes, these complaints are eternal.

So, what really is different now?

RH: The biggest change now that permeates a lot of aspects of young people’s lives are changes in technology.  There are two kinds: the always-connected internet stuff.  There’s also reproductive technology, which because of its [media ubiquity] is something people are taking for granted.

Young women are not at all feeling the age 30 deadline that my peers did [for having children].  The lack of feeling that pressure pushes back the urgency about accomplishing lots of things, not only marrying and having children, but also [issues] about career and where you want to live.

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Beginning today and continuing through Friday, we will be highlighting the expert analysis and thoughtful recommendations of 12 pastors, scholars and opinion leaders from across the country. They respond to the recently released report titled Does the Shape of Families Shape Faith? Challenging Churches to Confront the Impact of Family Change, funded by the Lilly Endowment and published by the Center for Marriage and Families at the Institute for American Values.

more, with a link to all the posts

Hollywood reports:

Bravo is stepping a little outside of its wheelhouse with its latest reality series order. The network announced Wednesday that it has given the green light to Extreme Guide to Parenting (working title).

The unscripted effort from Punched in the Head is intended to offer a candid glimpse into the lives of people using unconventional parenting tactics. The overprotective, fiercely competitive and nondisciplinarian will all be included — as will parents who breastfeed their children past age 4.

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reports:

China’s “Little Emperors” — the generations of only-children born under the government’s rigid “one child” policy — are living up to their name.

A study published Thursday in the journal Science has found that compared with two groups of people born in the years before China began its harsh population-control policy, those born after were less conscientious, more risk-averse and less inclined to compete with — or cooperate with — others. …

The mismatch between widespread attitudes in China and hard data from researchers was a puzzle to a pair of economists at Australia’s Monash University — one of whom emigrated from China and has a single daughter born there under the one-child policy.

Lisa Cameron and Xin Meng set out to capture changes wrought by the one-child policy with a battery of economic games designed to measure a player’s propensity toward altruism, trust, competitiveness and risk-taking.

Cameron and Xin recruited 215 people born in 1975 and 1978, before the policy began, and 208 people born in 1980 and 1983, after the policy was implemented. Among the older group, 55% had at least one sibling, compared with 15% in the younger group.

Each subject completed a 44-question personality inventory to gauge such traits as extroversion, agreeableness and negativity. The study volunteers also played games that are thought to reveal the true behavioral inclinations of players rather than their fleeting emotions or the values they claim to embrace. As they played through these games, the contrasts between the two groups were striking, the researchers said.

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blogs at Psychology Today:

…Now, about the children. I wish I could say that there are stacks of methodologically rigorous studies comparing the implications for children whose parents are or are not polyamorous. Instead, there are very few, so any conclusions are tentative at best.

The authors of the review article believe that the implications for the children of their parents’ relationships are most likely to be noteworthy if those relationships are not hidden from the children. So the review article focuses on those families in which some or all of the various partners are involved in the children’s lives, either as co-parents or in roles similar to those of aunts or uncles.

Elisabeth Sheff has conducted two studies of the well-being of the children of polyamorous parents. In one, she interviewed the parents, and in the other, she talked to children between 5 and 18 years old. (Based on what is reported in the review article, I don’t think she interviewed other families for comparison. Like I said, we need more research, and more rigorous research.)

The Perspective of the Polyamorous Parents

In the interviews, the parents described a number of ways their children benefited from the polyamory:

• “The children had more individualized time with adults.”
• They “could spend less time in day care because of the flexibility of having multiple parental figures involved in their lives.”
• “…the greater diversity of interests available from adult figures helped children foster a wider variety of hobbies and skills.”

The parents mentioned drawbacks as well, particularly “the discomfort of having partnerships between adults dissolve and the resulting emotional trauma for children who may have been very attached to a departing partner.”

The Perspective of the Children

The children Sheff interviewed were mostly White and middle class. Her impression was that they were “articulate, thoughtful, intelligent, and secure in their relationships with their parents.” The older children were more aware of being in an unusual family situation than the younger ones, but they were not questioned by school personnel or other students about having multiple parental figures in their lives because so many of the other students did, too (e.g., step-parents, romantic partners of single parents).

The children did not express the same concern with the real or potential loss of adult attachments as their parents did. As the authors of the review article explained:

“Many of the children reported that their parents’ former partners stayed involved in their lives even after the sexual or romantic phase of the partners’ relationships to the parents ended. The children did report experiencing some pain at losing the friendship of adults who were not involved in their lives any longer, but they felt this pain for both former romantic partners and also for platonic friends of parents whom they no longer saw for a variety of reasons.”

more (and more here, including bibliographies; and “Note that much of the information comes only from gay couples.”)

feature:

Law student Michael Corliss thought he was just being a “law nerd” when he chose a passage from the landmark court decision that allowed same-sex marriage in Massachusetts to be read at his August wedding ceremony.

But it turned out that Corliss, a Milton native, and his bride, Amelia Neptune, both 28, were not alone.

Portions of the decision in Goodridge v. Department of Public Health, the 2003 Supreme Judicial Court ruling that made Massachusetts the first state to recognize gay marriages, have become common wedding readings among both same-sex and heterosexual couples in Massachusetts and beyond, several local wedding celebrants said. …

“Civil marriage is at once a deeply personal commitment to another human being and a highly public celebration of the ideals of mutuality, companionship, intimacy, fidelity, and family,” a key passage reads. “Because it fulfills yearnings for security, safe haven, and connection that express our common humanity, civil marriage is an esteemed institution, and the decision whether and whom to marry is among life’s momentous acts of self-definition.”

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report:

The first-ever examination of the Internet’s impact on adoption, released today, concludes that social media and other elements of this modern technology are having “transformative” effects – positive and negative – on adoption policy, practice and millions of people’s lives, while raising serious legal, ethical and procedural concerns that have yet to be addressed.

“Untangling the Web: The Internet’s Transformative Impact on Adoption” is the initial publication of a multiyear research project on the subject by the Donaldson Adoption Institute. Its key findings include:

• There is a growing “commodification” of adoption on the web, replete with dubious practices, and a shift away from the perspective that its primary purpose is to find families for children.
• Finding birth relatives is becoming increasingly easy and commonplace, with significant institutional and personal implications, including the likely end of the era of “closed” adoption.
• A growing number of young adoptees are forming relationships with birth relatives, sometimes without their adoptive parents’ knowledge and usually without guidance or preparation.
• A rising number of websites offer useful, positive resources and expedite the adoption of children and youth who need families, notably including those with special needs. …

Among the recommendations in the Institute’s 70-page report are:

• Professionals who deal with expectant and pre-adoptive parents should get training reflecting the certainty that many, if not most of their clients. will be able to find each other at some point, and should educate them about the benefits of openness and the realities of such relationships.

• Practitioners should get additional training and resources to enable them to better assist the growing number of adopted individuals and others who seek help with search and reunion.

• Policy and law-enforcement officials should routinely review online adoption-related sites/activity for fraud, exploitation or other illegal/unethical practices, and should take action as warranted.

• Laws that impede the parties to adoption from gaining significant information, including “closed records” statutes, should be repealed since the Internet obviates their main contemporary rationale (i.e., preventing the affected parties from learning about and finding each other).

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reports:

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reports:

Growing numbers of elderly and sick Germans are being sent overseas for long-term care in retirement and rehabilitation centres because of rising costs and falling standards in Germany.

The move, which has seen thousands of retired Germans rehoused in homes in eastern Europe and Asia, has been severely criticised by social welfare organisations who have called it “inhumane deportation”.

But with increasing numbers of Germans unable to afford the growing costs of retirement homes, and an ageing and shrinking population, the number expected to be sent abroad in the next few years is only likely to rise. Experts describe it as a “time bomb”.

Germany’s chronic care crisis – the care industry suffers from lack of workers and soaring costs – has for years been mitigated by eastern Europeans migrating to Germany in growing numbers to care for the country’s elderly.

But the transfer of old people to eastern Europe is being seen as a new and desperate departure, indicating that even with imported, cheaper workers, the system is unworkable.

Germany has one of the fastest-ageing populations in the world, and the movement here has implications for other western countries, including Britain, particularly amid fears that austerity measures and rising care costs are potentially undermining standards of residential care.

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feature:

…“It was as if the music stopped,” Ms. LaShawn, 31, said, recalling how the date this year went so wrong so quickly after she tried to answer his question honestly. “It was really awkward because he kept telling me that I was the perfect girl for him, but that a low credit score was his deal-breaker.”

The credit score, once a little-known metric derived from a complex formula that incorporates outstanding debt and payment histories, has become an increasingly important number used to bestow credit, determine housing and even distinguish between job candidates.

It’s so widely used that it has also become a bigger factor in dating decisions, sometimes eclipsing more traditional priorities like a good job, shared interests and physical chemistry. That’s according to interviews with more than 50 daters across the country, all under the age of 40.

“Credit scores are like the dating equivalent of a sexually transmitted disease test,” said Manisha Thakor, the founder and chief executive of MoneyZen Wealth Management, a financial advisory firm. “It’s a shorthand way to get a sense of someone’s financial past the same way an S.T.D. test gives some information about a person’s sexual past.”

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reports:

Her clients know her as “the child support lady with the cool truck.”

Chantale Suttle thinks that’s a pretty good description of her and her months-old business, DADvocacy.

For almost 20 years, she’s dealt with child support issues. In law school at the University of Miami, she interned in the child support office, and she went on to handle child support issues as a prosecutor, defense attorney and magistrate judge.

These days, she helps dads navigate the child support system from her mobile office: a bulletproof truck, wrapped with a photo of a man’s muscular, crossed arms, complete with a soundproof consultation room, sports magazines, sodas — and free diapers.

“We do not want to be fancy, golf-playing, mahogany-office kind of lawyers. I’m just a lady you come talk to about child support,” said 42-year old Suttle.

And for teen dads, she does it for free.

“I feel that’s when I can help them the most, and I feel that’s where being part of the child support system can be the most damaging to his future because of the credit bureau reporting,” Suttle said.

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from NYT, via First Things’s TKB:

…American life, as he describes it, simply lacks the fretwork of close, sometimes constricting relationships that take shape around a Russian practically from birth.

He writes of “a complete absence of the social institution of the grandmother and grandfather, in the Russian understanding of that role,” since instead of spending their 50s and 60s raising grandchildren, American women “are busy with their own lives.” Generations within American families “rapidly distance themselves from one another,” and Americans don’t hire their friends as doctors and lawyers, preferring to keep their professional ties untainted by personal ones.

He devotes many pages to privacy, a word that does not exist in the Russian language, or in the airless human mass that forms when Russians wait in line. Americans, he reports, prefer to converse at a distance of at least four feet.

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in The New Republic:

…I also spent those 50-minute sessions wondering: What if my son’s individual experience, meaningless from a statistical point of view, hinted at a collective problem? As my children grew and, happily, thrived (I managed to have my daughter by natural means), I kept meeting children of friends and acquaintances, all roughly my age, who had Asperger’s, autism, obsessive-compulsive disorder, attention-deficit disorder, sensory-integration disorder. Curious as to whether there were more developmental disabilities than there used to be, I looked it up and found that, according to the Centers for Disease Control, learning problems, attention-deficit disorders, autism and related disorders, and developmental delays increased about 17 percent between 1997 and 2008. One in six American children was reported as having a developmental disability between 2006 and 2008. That’s about 1.8 million more children than a decade earlier.

Soon, I learned that medical researchers, sociologists, and demographers were more worried about the proliferation of older parents than my friends and I were. They talked to me at length about a vicious cycle of declining fertility, especially in the industrialized world, and also about the damage caused by assisted-reproductive technologies (ART) that are commonly used on people past their peak childbearing years. This past May, an article in the New England Journal of Medicine found that 8.3 percent of children born with the help of ART had defects, whereas, of those born without it, only 5.8 percent had defects.

A phrase I heard repeatedly during these conversations was “natural experiment.” As in, we’re conducting a vast empirical study upon an unthinkably large population: all the babies conceived by older parents, plus those parents, plus their grandparents, who after all have to wait a lot longer than they used to for grandchildren. It was impressed upon me that parents like us, with our aging reproductive systems and avid consumption of fertility treatments, would change the nature of family life. We might even change the course of our evolutionary future. For we are bringing fewer children into the world and producing a generation that will be subtly different—“phenotypically and biochemically different,” as one study I read put it—from previous generations. …

A REMARKABLE FEATURE of the new older parenting is how happy women seem to be about it. It’s considered a feminist triumph, in part because it’s the product of feminist breakthroughs: birth control, which gives women the power to pace their own fertility, and access to good jobs, which gives them reason to delay it. Women simply assume that having a serious career means having children later and that failing to follow that schedule condemns them to a lifetime of reduced opportunity—and they’re not wrong about that. So each time an age limit is breached or a new ART procedure is announced, it’s met with celebration. Once again, technology has given us the chance to lead our lives in the proper sequence: education, then work, then financial stability, then children.

As a result, the twenties have turned into a lull in the life cycle, when many young men and women educate themselves and embark on careers or journeys of self-discovery, or whatever it is one does when not surrounded by diapers and toys. This is by no means a bad thing, for children or for adults. Study after study has shown that the children of older parents grow up in wealthier households, lead more stable lives, and do better in school. After all, their parents are grown-ups.

But the experience of being an older parent also has its emotional disadvantages. For one thing, as soon as we procrastinators manage to have kids, we also become members of the “sandwich generation.” That is, we’re caught between our toddlers tugging on one hand and our parents talking on the phone in the other, giving us the latest updates on their ailments. Grandparents well into their senescence provide less of the support younger grandparents offer—the babysitting, the spoiling, the special bonds between children and their elders through which family traditions are passed.

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blog (and sorry to send you down a rabbit hole, since there are some intense and worthwhile links in his post as well):

…Here I think Kenworthy combines a dose of useful skepticism about efforts to promote marriage via social pressure alone with a dose of unwarranted optimism about the current trajectory of working-class childbearing. He’s clearly right to note that while marriage can dramatically improve the socioeconomic prospects for parents and children alike, this only holds if the man is actually bringing something to the table, and isn’t just a drain on his wife’s financial and emotional resources. (Anyone interested in pondering the latter problem should combine repeated viewings of “Teen Mom” with this depressing Jonathan Rauch article.) Sometimes the institution of marriage stabilizes feckless men, and helps them become real fathers and providers, but sometimes it doesn’t — and the material foundation available to the couple can make all the difference. This is why social conservatism without some kind of economic agenda focused on working class interests is at best woefully incomplete: To encourage a virtuous interaction between family stability and economic opportunity, policymakers have to work both halves of the circle.

But if just encouraging expectant couples to tie to the knot is an insufficient response to the downscale social crisis, putting too much faith in the “progress” offered by delayed childbearing also seems like a mistake. As Kenworthy allows, less-educated women are already waiting longer and longer to have children — and yet to date, the decline in teen births hasn’t led to a decline in the out-of-wedlock birth rate rate (quite the opposite), or made the “marriage” part of the education-job-marriage-children path any easier to follow. Delayed childbearing does seem to have reduced the working class birthrate overall, or at least increased the rate of childlessness among women without a college education. But that fertility drop hasn’t delivered more family stability to the downscale women who do have kids, or to the children themselves.

Now there’s a case to be made, I suppose, that this combination — higher out-of-wedlock births in downscale communities, but fewer children overall — is just the best American society can do. The two-parent family isn’t coming back, this argument might run, the working class male can’t hack it in the new economy, so better to just encourage working class women to have fewer children so that their work-life balance is easier to manage and the children that they do have aren’t competing for scarce maternal resources with too many brothers and sisters. We just need to live with the marital landscape as it is, accept that fatherless households and male shiftlessness (decadence …?) will be the norm in working class America for the foreseeable future, and try to mitigate the negative consequences for the kids born into unstable homes by hoping that fewer of them are born at all.

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Mark Adomanis at Forbes:

…While Douthat is right that the move towards lower fertility has occurred in essentially all wealthy and developed countries, the specifics vary greatly: Sweden‘s 1.98 TFR is pretty low by historical standards, but from the perspective of long-term viability it looks a heck of a lot better than Germany‘s 1.39. Even within supposedly decadent and corrupt Europe, there are very large variations both in fertility patterns and in economic dynamism.

Is it actually true that countries with lower fertility systematically chose “stagnation” over innovation? Are countries with a more robust focus on child-rearing actually more dynamic and innovative?

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and Samuel Goldman at the American Conservative:

…These numbers suggest that changing incentives is insufficient to promote larger families.      Fertility in France and Sweden might be even lower without generous subsidies. Yet those policies haven’t exactly created a baby boom. And Americans continue to reproduce at a relatively high rate even in the absence of generous social policy.

Although it may not be politically helpful to say so, Douthat is mostly right about the underlying reason for these trends. Quite apart from economic incentives, the sexual revolution fundamentally altered the normative order of Western societies.

But Douthat’s wrong to give present comfort such a dominant role in this structure. The master value of the modern West isn’t enjoyment, but personal autonomy. And it’s hard to pursue your own goals in your own way when encumbered by offspring, particularly in the numbers necessary to population growth.

If they are to have even limited success, then, policies intended to remedy declining birthrates must accept this change. In other words, they can and should aim to make it easier for people who want families to have and raise children.

But there’s not much government can do to encourage people who regard children as a burden to produce them. Only a major cultural change could do that. In this respect, the demographic future of Western societies may depend on the fate of their religious traditions much more than on their tax codes. I’m not holding my breath for neo-liberals to acknowledge that.

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at Reason:

When it comes to Americans’ understanding of sexual privacy and public sexual expression, most of us are effectively members of the American Civil Liberties Union. This is so even for people who carry no card, pay no dues, and—if such a thing were possible—have never even heard of the organization.

That’s the takeaway from How Sex Became a Civil Liberty, Leigh Ann Wheeler’s dense but fascinating account of the ACLU’s wildly successful efforts, since its founding almost 100 years ago, to bring sex under the purview of the Bill of Rights. Wheeler, a Binghamton University historian, could have stuck with a wonky narrative about a long march of law and jurisprudence. Instead, she’s taken what she calls an “empathic” approach. She has combed vast archives, including personal correspondence of the ACLU’s founders and decades of files from the national office and local affiliates.

From these papers she has assembled a story about men and women working through their own sexual passions and contradictions as they shaped a legal and political practice for the entire country. She reveals how activists pushed, slouched, and pushed some more to arm their fellow citizens with sexual rights, even as those rights provoked further conflicts, including among ACLUers themselves.

Wheeler’s story starts in the 1920s, as young, educated men and women flocked to Greenwich Village to partake of a modernist cultural revolution with heady new ideas about the nature and purpose of sex. One of these migrants was Roger Baldwin. As a 12- or 13-year-old in the 1890s, he had been seduced by his family’s Irish servant. He’d spent the next few years having sex with her, learning, as he put it, “everything that was to be known, even how to prevent getting her pregnant.”

In the Village, Baldwin met Madeleine Zabriskie Doty, who had spent her youth wondering if she was physically attracted to women rather than men. By the 1920s, she was in love with Baldwin. The couple wed in the new style, sans ring or vows. And Baldwin founded the ACLU.

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in the Weekly Standard:

…All of the research, however, indicates that in recent years the fertility rate of Hispanic Americans has been moving downward faster than it has for any other ethnic group.

Last week the Pew Center reported that from 2007 to 2010 America’s birth rate dropped by 8 percent. The decline was relatively modest for native-born Americans—only a 6 percent drop. But the immigrant birth rate dropped by 14 percent. And the birth rate for Mexican-born immigrants dropped by 23 percent. These declines were outsized, but they fit the larger trend. From 1990 to 2007, the Mexican-born birth rate had already dropped by 26 percent.

None of this is meant to predict that by such and such year there will be exactly so many Hispanic Americans. Social science has limits, and they are even nearer than you think. But when you look at the assumptions underlying the predictions for America’s Hispanic future, they’re even more uncertain than usual—and in fact are already a decade or so out of step with reality. America’s Great Hispanic Future is probably being oversold. And possibly by quite a bit.

You don’t hear nearly as much about the rise of single voters, despite the fact that they represent a much more significant trend. Only a few analysts, such as Ruy Teixera, James Carville, and Stanley Greenberg, have emphasized how important singletons were to President Obama’s reelection. Properly understood, there is far less of a “gender” gap in American politics than people think. Yes, President Obama won “women” by 11 points (55 percent to 44 percent). But Mitt Romney won married women by the exact same margin. To get a sense of how powerful the marriage effect is, not just for women but for men, too, look at the exit polls by marital status. Among nonmarried voters—people who are single and have never married, are living with a partner, or are divorced—Obama beat Romney 62-35. Among married voters Romney won the vote handily, 56-42.

Far more significant than the gender gap is the marriage gap. And what was made clear in the 2012 election was that the cohorts of unmarried women and men are now at historic highs—and are still increasing. This marriage gap—and its implications for our political, economic, and cultural future—is only dimly understood.

Americans have been wedded to marriage for a very long time. Between 1910 and 1970, the “ever-married rate”—that is, the percentage of people who marry at some point in their lives—went as high as 98.3 percent and never dipped below 92.8 percent. Beginning in 1970, the ever-married number began a gradual decline so that by 2000 it stood at 88.6 percent.  …

The economic effects are similarly unclear. On the one hand, judging from the booming economic progress in highly single countries such as Singapore and Taiwan, singletons can work longer hours and move more easily for jobs. Which would make a single society good for the economy. (At least in the short term, until the entitlement systems break because there aren’t enough new taxpayers being born.) There is, however, an alternative economic theory. Last summer demographers Patrick Fagan and Henry Potrykus published a paper examining the effect of nonmarriage on the labor participation rate. Fagan and Potrykus were able to identify a clear statistical effect of marriage on men’s labor participation. What they found is that without the responsibility of families to provide for, unmarried American males have historically tended to drop out of the labor force, exacerbating recessionary tendencies in the economy. We’ll soon find out which view is correct.

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report:

The U.S. birth rate dipped in 2011 to the lowest ever recorded, led by a plunge in births to immigrant women since the onset of the Great Recession.

The overall U.S. birth rate, which is the annual number of births per 1,000 women in the prime childbearing ages of 15 to 44, declined 8% from 2007 to 2010. The birth rate for U.S.-born women decreased 6% during these years, but the birth rate for foreign-born women plunged 14%—more than it had declined over the entire 1990-2007 period.¹ The birth rate for Mexican immigrant women fell even more, by 23%. …

The fall in the number of births to immigrant women is explained by behavior (falling birth rates), rather than population composition (change in the number of women of childbearing age), according to a Pew Research analysis. Despite a recent drop in unauthorized immigration from Mexico, the largest source country for U.S. immigrants, the Pew Research analysis found no decline in the number of foreign-born women of childbearing age.³

This report does not address the reasons that women had fewer births after 2007, but a previous Pew Research analysis⁴ concluded that the recent fertility decline is closely linked to economic distress. States with the largest economic declines from 2007 to 2008, as shown by six major indicators, were most likely to experience relatively large fertility declines from 2008 to 2009, the analysis found.

Both foreign- and U.S.-born Hispanic women had larger birth rate declines from 2007 to 2010 than did other groups. Hispanics also had larger percentage declines in household wealth than white, black or Asian households from 2005 to 2009.⁵ Poverty and unemployment also grew more sharply for Latinos than for non-Latinos after the Great Recession began, and most Hispanics say that the economic downturn was harder on them than on other groups.⁶

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from BYU:

A national study found that college students think 25 years old is the “right age” to get married, while a majority of parents feel 25 is still a little too soon. So it’s no coincidence that when Justin Bieber said he’d like to wed by 25, Oprah Winfrey urged him to wait longer.

“The assumption has been that the younger generation wants to delay marriage and parents are hassling them about when they would get married,” said Brian Willoughby, a professor at Brigham Young University and lead author of the study. “We actually found the opposite, that the parental generation is showing the ‘slow down’ mindset more than the young adults.”

Willoughby and his co-authors in BYU’s School of Family Life gathered info from 536 college students and their parents from five college campuses around the country (BYU was not in the sample). As they report in The Journal of Social and Personal Relationships,the scholars found the hesitation is consistent across gender.

“Initially we thought that this might be dads wanting their daughters to delay marriage,” Willoughby said. “Moms and dads trended together – gender wasn’t a factor.”

One of the driving forces behind parents’ restraint is the feeling that their children should get an education first. While they generally feel marriage is important, parents think the “right age” is one year older than what their children say. Excluding teen marriages, research doesn’t support the notion that there is an optimal time to tie the knot.

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reports:

Dr. Ernest Zeringue was looking for a niche in the cutthroat industry of fertility treatments.

He seized on price, a huge obstacle for many patients, and in late 2010 began advertising a deal at his Davis, Calif., clinic unheard of anywhere else: Pregnancy for $9,800 or your money back.

That’s about half the price for in vitro fertilization at many other clinics, which do not include money-back guarantees. Typically, insurance coverage is limited and patients pay again and again until they give birth — or give up.

Those patients use their own eggs and sperm — or carefully select donors when necessary — and the two are combined in a petri dish to create a batch of embryos. Usually one or two are then transferred to the womb. Any embryos left over are the property of the customers.

Zeringue sharply cuts costs by creating a single batch of embryos from one egg donor and one sperm donor, then divvying it up among several patients. The clinic, not the customer, controls the embryos, typically making babies for three or four patients while paying just once for the donors and the laboratory work.

People buying this option from Zeringue must accept concessions: They have no genetic connection to their children, and those children will probably have full biological siblings born to other parents.

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blogs at Christianity Today:

…Some time ago in the school cafeteria, we ran into a young woman we knew well. Shawn and I had counseled her and her boyfriend the year prior. I asked her about their relationship. “I broke up with him a month or so ago,” she said sheepishly. Shawn and I tried to veil our shock.

A few minutes later, I asked her why. “He’s just not a spiritual leader,” she answered. After we parted ways, Shawn turned to me and said, “I can’t help wondering how many otherwise beautiful relationships have ended due to misconceptions about spiritual leadership.”

As we processed the news and recalled some of our conversations with the couple, we remembered her saying that he had a patient nature, was intelligent, a hard worker, and of peaceful demeanor, complementing her quite well. But she also mentioned that he rarely initiated prayer or Bible study. For her, in the end, not initiating in those areas was a deal-breaker, even though we found them a highly compatible couple that simply needed to iron out a few wrinkles. (I realize there could’ve been more going on, and I certainly don’t recommend ignoring red flags.)

It wasn’t the first time I’d heard the complaint: “He’s not a spiritual leader.” It seems that initiating prayer, Bible study, and other similar devotional activities is a litmus test for male spiritual leadership in some branches of the American church. And the common complaint by women on our campus is that men are failing in spiritual leadership; they aren’t passing the litmus test. They aren’t initiating.

But after Shawn’s comment that day, I started wondering about all the godly men who may have other spiritual gifts—just not the ones traditionally considered “male” spiritual gifts. For example, what about men who have the gift of mercy or hospitality or service or encouragement, and who are full of the fruits of the Spirit? Do we devalue them simply because they’re not at the helm or out in front but rather operating alongside their partner? Is initiating devotional activities within a relationship really what it means to lead?

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post:

The surprise sweep for marriage equality efforts at the polls in 2012 came after a dramatic shift in the television ads their backers ran — a change that came about after a year-long research effort to crack the code of previously successful ads run by marriage equality opponents that focused on “gay marriage” being taught in schools.

Among the key changes: A shift away from talk of “rights” to a focus on committed relationships; a decision to address “values” directly as being learned at home; and an attempt to give voters “permission” to change their minds, according to elements of the research shared with BuzzFeed. …

Why did it work? The summary explains, noting, “Participants strongly identified with the journey and positive values components of this message, but they were particularly compelled by the idea that core values are taught at home.” The summary also noted, visually, the importance of physically staging ads in the home: “Reinforcing the notion that parents convey values in the home, in conjunction with physically locating the conversation in that safe environment, shifted the dynamic and brought participants back to a more open and supportive place.”

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at Slate (and I think Regnerus could mention both a) greater acceptance of out-of-wedlock childbearing and b) incarceration rates):

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